salesforce.com

In the last few weeks I’ve started to riff on James Govenor’s meme, that of developers becoming the new kingmakers. I recently wrote a post discussing what I saw happening with Salesforce – how the combination of force.com and Heroku was creating a real gravity pull for developers and that Salesforce was primed to be […]

I’ve been following Google Apps and Salesforce reseller since it launched a few years ago – in that time I’ve seen them acquire companies globally and grow into a real force in the space. I’m always a little dubious about how much long term viability there is in a company that makes its money earning […]

At the defrag conference recently, I took part in a few sessions that looks at the broader role of identity in a world were more and more people use cloud-based tools. One of the sessions was led by Pat Patterson, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce. In his session, Patterson drew a picture of the history […]

Having had a little while to reflect on a month that saw me attend both DreamForce and BoxWorks, I wanted to get down some thoughts on what is happening with Box, one of Silicon Valley’s current darlings. This is all the more relevant given the slightly uncomfortable position that Box found itself in after DreamWorks […]

My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource […]

It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.

SaaS entrepreneurs shouldn’t need a TechOps team until they hit $20m in revenue. I’m willing to write a piece of the Series A check to whoever can really fully solve this problem so that TechOps becomes a side issue.

… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.

The announcement by Salesforce a few weeks ago that it was moving into the enterprise Single Sign on (SSO) space was both an excellent validation that sso across cloud and on-premise applications is needed, but also a rude awakening to the existing independent SSO vendors like OneLogin and Okta. While

“Mobile First.” OK, we all get it. Look what’s happening on Facebook, as the majority of its usage has rapidly transitioned to mobile, throwing at least a wrench into its browser-based ad model for the time being. Google, Zynga, etc. the impact is huge and clear. Apple seems to be the only one in consumer […]

The thing is, what you really have to ask yourself, if you are growing less than 100-150% YoY — all the way to $100m in ARR — is the market just too small? Or if not — am I just not well enough positioned in the market?

Not tooo long ago, I was meeting with one of EchoSign’s largest customers. As I was coming, someone else was leaving – Marc Benioff. He’d come (flying private I assume, and possibly straight from Hawaii) to … kiss the customer’s arse, as near as I could tell. The customer already had thousands and thousands of […]

When Salesforce announced their ChatterBox content collaboration solutions a couple of weeks ago, the one vendor most impacted by the news was Box – partly because they’d previously been an important partner of Salesforce, but also because the announcement cut off some of Box’s oxygen, especially inside companies who are

OK, so I ‘m abandoning my pictorial post schedule, as Box-mania just broke out, and I feel compelled to jump in. But the skipped NetSuite post is coming soon… I’ve been following Box longer than probably most observers and some of the old memories are worth sharing – from an admittedly subjective point of view. […]

While at DreamForce recently I took the opportunity to sit down and talk with BlueWolf a business process and strategy consultancy that does a lot of work with mid sized and enterprise customers helping them move their IT to a more agile way of doing things. BlueWolf has some 3000 customers across tech, financial services […]